The London Borough of Merton directly provides a Reablement Service which is made up of 4 teams covering the Borough. The service responds to all new referrals for support and care at home, providing high levels of care in conjunction with health services which are designed to enable people to regain lost skills and abilities over a 6 week period. At the conclusion of this time any care requirements are met by one of the external home care providers.
In keeping with the Council’s ongoing commitment to deliver improved efficiency and enhanced quality, they were keen to evaluate the use of optimisation technology and commissioned OptiCare in December 2010 to carry out work which would deliver a business case and produce and model an alternative rota for the deployment of Care Workers. A detailed analysis of the service highlighted 2 clear but related areas which were adversely affecting effective performance and contributing to high unit costs. These were:
A lack of fit between Care Worker availability and Service User demand
High levels of unused contract time
Despite these issues Opticare identified that an overall cost reduction of 14.45% would be achieved if Care Worker schedules were optimised and unused contract hours minimised. Following an interim report it was agreed that significant organisational changes would need to be made prior to any further optimisation analysis and rota re-design being completed.
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